Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Grant Rodwell
Charles Darwin University
This paper aims to illustrate how the historical novel may be used as an
engaging teacher/learning strategy for undergraduate student teachers in pre-service
teacher education units, the vast majority of which simply provide for a single 10-
credit point unit in order to prepare student teachers for the classroom. First, this
paper will argue the historical fiction narrative is an engaging medium. It will then
attempt a brief survey of the wider popularity of historical fiction in society-at-large
and the way in which this is associated with the popularity of memory literature in
general. It will then attempt an analysis of how historical fiction can assist in
developing student teachers’ appreciation of ‘historical literacy’. But what sort of
historical literature should we encourage student teachers to engage in? Social norms
and values are constantly changing, so how do readers and critics interpret historical
novels written years ago? In response to this question, the paper shall examine the
issue of interpreting historical fiction, and what does literary interpretation mean? But
how much faith should student teachers be encouraged to place in the veracity of
historical fiction? This question is examined in conclusion to this paper.
Maxine Greene (1995, p. 36) writes of the importance of imagination in ‘the
lives of teachers as it is in the lives of students’, partly because an imaginative teacher
with a passion for her/his subject matter will excite and motivate students in the same
way. Teachers have a special role in connecting their students with creative literature,
but they must themselves be first connected to creative literature. Herein is the special
role for historical novels in awakening in children a passion for history.
This paper does not argue that all teaching of history curriculum in pre-service
units should be based on the use of historical novels as a stimulus, nor does it argue
for a particular percentage of the use of historical novels in such units. It simply seeks
to argue the case for this particular approach, leaving the amount of time devoted to
the use of historical novels in history curriculum units to the professional expertise of
the lecturers responsible for the units.
Engaging the audience in historical images and memory through the narrative
wide interest in Australian historical fiction noted by Nile, of course, readers can
reflect upon the nationalistic upsurge in a general interest in the Australian past as
reflected by the massive increase in attendance at such events as the Anzac Day
Gallipoli dawn service, treks along the Kokoda Trail, or expeditions to Flanders
Fields. But, there is more appeal for historical fiction than simply referring to
attendance at passing cultural events.
Historical fiction is that in which real-life historical figures appear, or have
been represented diaphanously cloaked, along with depictions of historical
consciousness. George Lukacs takes this further, reminding us that the
groundbreaking historical novels of Sir Walter Scott ‘portray the struggles and
antagonisms of history by means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny,
always represent social trends and historical forces’ (Lukacs, 1937/1963, p. 34).
But, of course, when Nile (2008) writes of readers learning from ‘imaginative
journeys’ through their readings of historical novels, he suggests there is some
worthwhile knowledge to be gained. What sort of knowledge is this, and whose
knowledge is it? Is the acclaim for the historical novel universal?
Indeed, student teachers and teachers would be aware the enormous growth
in the publication and sales of Australian fiction is not universally acclaimed. For
example, Delia Falconer (2006) laments the decline of the Australian novel with a
contemporary setting, complaining ‘since early 2002 this anxiety about the state of
the art has centred on the content of Australian literature and its apparent failure to
confront the present’. Of course, she was able to find supporters for her cause. She
wrote ‘in the Bulletin (2002, 13 November) Hannie Rayson called for a ‘theatre of
engagement’, while in The Sydney Morning Herald, Malcolm Knox (2002, 21
January) and Drusilla Modjeska (2002, 8 August) took the Australian novel to task
for its retreat from modern life’ (Falconer, 2006). But as any bookseller can testify,
there is no denying the public demand for memory literature, in either its fictional or
non-fictional form.
Perhaps, associated with the baby-boomers, and imbedded in the rising tide of
electronic media, there has been a proliferation of ‘memory’ literature since the
1980s. And historians long have taken memory as the raw material for history, as a
means to getting at the truth of the past. Internationally, the memory literature of
recent years is connected most intimately with traumatic events such as the Holocaust,
the Cultural Revolution in China, or refugees. Witness such publishing phenomena as
Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982) and its movie version, Schindler’s List
(1993). Clearly, the boom in memory literature is concomitant with the rising tide of
the new postcolonial and postmodernist historiography and has engendered memory
with a greater status.
Continuing this theme, Arif Dirlik (2002, p. 76) writes:
Memory may serve different purposes under different circumstances for
different groups. … An event such as the Holocaust, Hayden White writes,
may ‘escape the grasp of any language even to describe it and of any
medium – verbal, visual, oral, or gestural – to represent it, much less of
any historical account adequately to explain it’ (White, 1996). Memories
of the experiences of traumatic events may in such cases well accomplish
what history is unable to capture or explain. Memories may also serve to
capture glimpses of the past for groups who have been erased from history.
On the other hand, they add moral force to history in the case of groups
(such as the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II), seeking
for recognition of their grievances.
In support of Dirlik’s contention, witness the recent popularity of John
Boyne’s The Boy in Striped Pyjamas (2006) written for an adolescent audience.
Publicly stated memory serves to bolster the self-images of newly empowered
groups seeking to overcome their images as victims in history. This is certainly the
case with First Nation Australian memory literature, such as the Rabbit Proof Fence
(2002), based on Doris Pilkinton’s biography, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996).
But other than engaging its readers, how else can the use of historical fiction as a
teaching/learning strategy with student teachers in universities assist in developing an
appreciation of history?
Earlier this decade, at the National Centre for History Education, Taylor (n.d.)
addressed the issue of developing ‘historical literacy’ in our school students. Rightly,
he first examined what comprised ‘historical literacy’. For him, the following
elements are part of this literacy:
Events of the past – knowing and understanding historical events, using prior
knowledge, and realising the significance of different events.
Narratives of the past – understanding the shape of change and continuity over
time, understanding multiple narratives and dealing with open-endedness.
Research skills – gathering, analysing and using the evidence (artefacts,
documents and graphics) and issues of provenance.
The language of history – understanding and dealing with the language of the
past.
Historical concepts – understanding historical concepts such as causation and
motivation.
ICT understandings – using, understanding and evaluating ICT-based
historical resources (the virtual archive).
Making connections – connecting the past with the self and the world today.
Contention and contestability – understanding the ‘rules’ and the place of
public and professional historical debate.
Representational expression – understanding and using creativity in
representing the past through film, drama, visual arts, music, fiction, poetry
and ICT.
Moral judgement in history – understanding the moral and ethical issues
involved in historical explanation.
Applied science in history – understanding the use and value of scientific and
technological expertise and methods in investigating past, such as DNA
analysis or gas chromatography tests.
Historical explanation – using historical reasoning, synthesis and
interpretation (the index of historical literacy) to explain the past. Historical
understanding is incomplete without explanation (Taylor, n.d.).
It is clear that historical fiction relates directly to many of these elements of
historical literacy. Indeed, Ruth Reynolds (2008) draws our attention to the fact that
Taylor and Young (n.d.) have historical narratives as a teaching/learning strategy
running through many of the points in the above paragraph. These are stories ‘about
issues and values that count across time’ (Reynolds, 2008, p. 5).
Crawford and Zygouris-Coe (2008, p. 197) endorse these points by arguing,
‘the use of historical fiction within the curricular context promotes a stronger
engagement between the reader and the text than does use of the traditional social
studies textbook’. The authors go on to argue, ‘this type of viewpoint can make a
tremendous difference not only in readers’ understanding of historical events, but also
in their understanding of the social consequences of these events’.
Clearly, however, the establishment of historical literacy must start with
student teachers in universities undertaking history curriculum units. This is one of
the reasons why the author of this paper chooses to use historical novels written for an
adult audience in his history curriculum units with his undergraduate student teachers.
This is the kind of novel that many of these students would choose to read, outside
their university study.
Not surprisingly, we have come to understand immersing children in a rich
variety of narratives, both fiction and non-fiction, enhances their development of
historical understanding as described by Sansom (1987). This is supported by
researchers such as Routman (2003) who reports that when students read a text, they
develop a number of metacognition reading strategies to infer understanding,
including making connections between the text and their life, other texts and world
experiences.
With this research and understanding in mind, recently in the United States,
historical fiction has begun to dominate major children’s book awards. Rycik and
Rosler (2009) have heralded this development in an article describing the values of
using high-quality historical fiction in the classroom. They also present different ways
to respond to this genre, including using modern technology. Adams (2001) has
argued selecting historical fiction as a teaching/learning strategy provides a literacy-
rich environment, which is meaningful, authentic and an engaging approach for
students (and we might add, student teachers) to learn about historical issues and
events according to Adams (2001).
An American fifth-grade teacher, recognized by the National Council for the
Social Studies as ‘Elementary Teacher of the Year’, Terry Lindquist has several
reasons why she teaches with historical fiction:
it piques kids’ curiosity about historical events;
provides them with everyday details that a textbook would miss;
gives students multiple perspectives on events; and
assists students contemplating the complexities of an issue.
Although Lindquist (1995, p. 48) uses many teaching methods in the social
studies classroom, she refers to historical fiction as the ‘spice’ which triggers student
inquiry into the facts that drive the fiction.
Lindquist (1995) finds the advantages of historical fiction lie with its ability to
unfold the events in history in layers where the reader understands the values, actions
and behaviours of historical characters. As a result, students are motivated to find out
the why? This distinguishes historical fiction from the traditional textbook where
historical events are usually summarised in a matter of words; therefore, historical
misconceptions and stereotypical attitudes are more likely to develop. Consequently,
teacher/student discussions are vitally important in this teaching/learning process,
where the teacher needs to question extensively and be alert to historical
misconceptions. These are experiences student teachers undertaking history
curriculum units in universities should have, and develop an understanding for.
Social norms and values change over the decades, so how do readers and
critics interpret historical novels written years ago? Davies (1996, p. 20) contends: ‘if,
‘History as Fiction’: ‘If the past is another country, historical novels are forged
passports’
Yet, Grenville was not being at all reckless. Indeed, she confessed to an abiding
regard for historical truth:
When Jill Roe said of history ‘Getting it right means you can’t make it up’,
it was a reminder to novelists like me that, although we might use history,
we also have to respect it. It’s all very well to play fast and loose with
historical truths, but there comes a point when we have to get it right, or try
at least (Grenville, 2005).
Of course, Grenville is addressing an important issue in the writing of history,
an issue that historiographers for decades have been addressing. The historical
novelist need not be ‘playing’ with history any more than the professional historian.
Generally, historians take their craft very seriously. They even have gone to
‘war’ over substantial issues in what they perceive to be appropriate recording of
history. Many students will be aware of the term ‘history wars’. It was coined in the
United States in 1994, to describe the argument between those who favoured a
triumphalist account of American achievement and those urging a more muted and
critical stance. Australia had its own ‘history wars’ beginning sometime around 2000
(Windschuttle, 2002).
When Grenville (2005) claimed her The Secret River (2005) would rise above
the parochial squabbles of the then raging history wars by getting ‘inside the
experience’ of the past, she provoked a strong response from some academic and
professional historians. As Collins puts it: ‘this ire was particularly surprising in the
case of Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen, two leading historians noted for the
eloquent reflective, literary quality of their respective books on the intimacy between
Indigenous and settler Australians’ (Collins, 2008).
Set amidst the raging debate of the ‘history wars’, Clendinnen (2003) and
McKenna (2002) questioned strongly Grenville’s views on the role of her historical
novel vis-à-vis her claims to historical truth over that of their own profession. Indeed,
it is this very jousting over the province of historians and historical novelists to
historical truth that has led Gay Lynch to assert, ‘historians would be better placed to
study King Canute than attempt to prevent fiction writers working in their field’
(Lynch, n.d.). Yet, serious professional historians do feel aggrieved about the various
raiding parties of historical novelists into their perceived traditional territory.
Nevertheless, who can deny the anger historians feel about their conflicted
place in the production of Australia’s cultural identity? In 2006, Clendinnen claimed
that ‘novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track’
(Clendinnen, (2006, p. 23, cited in Lynch, n.d.). She claimed she was on the lookout
for historical fiction writers who ‘show attitude (exuberant confidence, insouciant
exploitation of fragments of the past), lack historical professionalism (the collapsing
of time, opportunistic transpositions, and elisions) and show off their subjective
petticoats’ Clendinnen p. 23, cited in Lynch, n.d.).
All of this public literary jousting brought Lynch to ask: ‘have the battered
protagonists in the history wars tried to throw off the cheerful trailing historical
fiction writers doing business in their own way?’ Lynch then reminds readers what
was said at the close of a 2007 Sydney Writers’ Festival panel (‘Making a Fiction of
History’). Here, according to Lynch (n.d.), Clendinnen conceded some ‘fictional
truths’. For Lynch (n.d.), Clendinnen’s ‘consistent message might be: stay behind
your lines and you won’t get hurt’.
However, clearly Grenville’s Secret River (2005) has invited serious questions
about the relationship between history, literature, and public ethics in contemporary
Australia. While attracting praise and criticism for its representation of early
Australian frontier history, McKenna, has decried the positive reviews of the book as
symptomatic of ‘[a] cultural space [that] has opened up into which writers of fiction
are now more commonly seen as the most trustworthy purveyors of the past.’
Similarly, John Hirst considered the book was an expression of a misguided and ill-
informed contemporary liberal imagination (Lynch, n.d.).
But the developing public stoush seemed to be as much about professional
territory as anything else. Had writers of historical fiction any right to trespass into the
work of historians? In reviewing Grenville’s next novel, The Lieutenant (2008), Stella
Clarke reminded readers of what McKenna had said about Grenville ‘of getting above
herself, of thinking she was doing history better than the professionals’. As Stella
Clarke wrote, ‘it was fine for novelists and historians to jog along on their separate
tracks, on either side of the ravine (this is tough terrain) that separates truth from
untruth, but Clendinnen thought Grenville had somehow moved over and tried to
‘bump historians off the track’ (Clarke, 2008).
For Clarke, Grenville’s success in explaining her point of view ‘raised the
disquieting possibility that the river of fiction had burst its banks, threatening to
submerge facts’. A flood of debate resulted ‘that might clumsily be termed the history
and fiction wars’ (Clarke, 2008). Grenville’s response was convincing, and apparently
won over many doubters to the cause of historical fiction. Thus, her ‘decision, in The
Lieutenant, to keep trekking through the hazardous landscape of early colonial
history, where every shadow conceals an armed historian, suggests she also felt in
danger of being “bumped off the track”, and is now standing her ground’.
But with all this stoushing between writers of historical fiction and
professional historians, exactly what type of historical knowledge is at stake here?
How does the knowledge gained from reading historical novels, and that just
described by Grenville, fit with the kind of knowledge that Prime Minister John
Howard yearned for back on the eve of Australia Day 2006 to the National Press
Club?
Too often, [history] is taught without any sense of structured narrative,
replaced by a fragmented stew of ‘themes’ and ‘issues’. And too often,
history, along with other subjects in the humanities, has succumbed to a
postmodern culture of relativism where any objective record of
achievement is questioned and repudiated (Howard, 2006).
Of course, here Howard yearns for a history that advances a kind of eulogy of
Australia’s past, one in which there is a steady advancement of the nation,
highlighting advancement. This is often labelled evolutionary idealism.
Curthoys and Docker (2006) draw attention to the work done by Butterfield
(1931) in drawing criticism to evolutionary idealism, or a Whig interpretation of
history: ‘history should not be written as a story of progress. Butterfield not only
argued against triumphalist tendencies in historical writing, but also raised doubts
about the possibility of objective history itself’ (Curthoys & Docker, 2006, p. 98).
But how does this triumphalist-cum-evolutionary-idealist view of
history translate to those authors of historical fiction? The very sort of statement made
by Howard in such an influential national forum regarding Australian’s understanding
of our nation’s past has influenced writers such as Louise Wakeling (1998, pp. 16-17)
who, in regard to the writing of historical fiction, has stated:
New Historicists, in particular, have questioned the kind of totalising,
transcendent and coherent narratives which have given meaning to (or
rather imposed meaning on) past events, and hence their arguments are of
considerable relevance to any writer who aims to recreate some aspect of
the past in fictional mode, as in the historical novel. The question at issue
here, for the writer of fiction, as for the historiographer, is not so much the
truth or falsity of one view of history or another, but rather ‘Whose history
is it anyway?’ (emphasis in original).
It is the very question of evolutionary idealists’ interpretation of history –
historiography – that has motivated Wakeling (1998) to look to Hayden White
(White, 1982, pp 17-18, as cited in Wakeling, 1998, p. 17), who more that most in
post-colonial history, has been influential in persuading writers of history, in both
fictional and non-fictional forms to question their values in interpreting history. First,
writers need to recognise that history is chaos, and according to White’s view, ‘the
chaos of phenomena in the past that constitutes the most meaning of “history” is, in its
very ordering and setting down, made meaningful within the particular non-
contradictory, unitary world-view or ideology’ of the evolutionary idealist. And for
Wakeling (1998), reflecting on White’s work, ‘this is true for both factual and
fictional history. Historical discourses derive their form from whatever moral,
political, social or aesthetic values have in society, and sometimes in opposition to
them’. There can be no agnostic, innocent view of historical interpretation – all
writers of history are bound in an ideology of one form or other: ‘there can be no
“history” without ideology’ (Wakeling, 1998, p. 18).
Conclusions
References
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